An Ode to Taxi Divers

Spring semester of my freshman year of college, I signed up to take "Creative Writing" with Mary Brown. I'm not sure what I expected going into this class, but after the first 2 sessions, I called my Dad and told him that "These people have issues". I felt like you had to all but "become" the poem in order to get a clue what the professor and students were talking about. I presumed that if you were gifted, you could naturally "feel" what the poem was trying to express through it's abstract words and layout. I, however, thought I deserved a gift if I could just figure out why the title fit THIS poem and not the poem three pages before.

And then...

We had to write our own.

What had I gotten myself into?

Actually the semester proved to not be a total failure. In fact, I was quite proud of myself once the segment on poetry was over. I managed to come up with a few poems that were...well...not all that bad! I even found myself enjoying the class. The people that I thought "had issues" I realized I actually respected and admired them for the pieces of writing they produced. My professor told me that she could tell the point when I started "crossing over". She could see it in my writing. I still think everyone wrote far better than I did, but at least she could see I was trying.

Once we were done with poetry, we moved on to creative fiction. The outcome of the project was less than desiarable to say the least. My short story had something to do with 2 people getting caught in a tornado. (Look...it was the end of the semester, summer was right around the corner, and I had already spent my creative energy on the poetry side of things. I still ended up with an A or a B in the class, so...I was happy!)


The other day, Aaron and I went out to buy a new cell phone for him. After conducting our business, the salesman needed to write down a number for Aaron to call and activate something on our account. The salesman grabbed a business card that was sitting on a desk. It was advertising a taxi driver named Craig. As we were later driving home, I flipped over the card and discovered this poem on the back. As I read it out loud to Aaron, we were really "feeling" the poem. We were laughing sooo hard. I couldn't help but thinking to myself what Mary Brown and this year's Creative Writing students would have thought of this poem....or what they would have titled it. Better yet, what grade would I receive if I had turned in something like this:

The taxicab driver sits in his car,

And waits for calls from near and far.

He knows all the crooks, and he knows all the

rooks,

He knows all the bad roads, he knows all the nooks.

He knows our sorrows, he knows our joys,

He knows all the girls who are chasing the boys.

HE knows all our trouble, he knows all our strife.

He knows every man who ducks from his wife.

If the taxicab driver told half that he knows,

He would turn all our firends into foes.

He would sow a small breeze that would soon be a

gale,

Engulf us in trouble-land us in jail,

He would start forth a story, which gaining in

force,

Would cause half our wives to sue for divorce.

He'd get all our homes mixed up in a fight,

And turn our brightest days into sorrowing nights,

In fact, he could keep the whole town in a stew,

If he told half the things he knew.

So here we are- just pay us our fees, we don't know

a thing about our ABC's.

Craig...for what it's worth, your poem would have still probably faired better with Mary Brown than my tornado story did. Thanks for the laugh!